Chapter 46:
The origin of Tennessee.—Hillsborough's Administration of the Colonies continued.October, 1770—June, 1771.
The Colonization of the West was one of theChap. XLVI.} 1770. Oct. |
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great objects ever promoted by Franklin.
No one had more vividly discerned the capacity of the Mississippi valley not only to sustain Commonwealths, but to connect them with the world by commerce; and when the Ministers would have rejected the Fort Stanwix Treaty,1 which conveyed from the Six Nations an inchoate title to the immense territory southwest of the Ohio, his influence secured its ratification, by organizing a powerful company to plant a Province in that part of the country which lay back of Virginia, between the Alleghanies and a line drawn from the Cumberland Gap to the mouth of the Scioto.2
1 W. S. Johnson to Joseph Chew, 13 Feb. 1770.
2 See the elaborate Petition of Works. Benjamin Franklin to Congress, Passy, 20 Feb. 1780; not in his
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
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